The Chronicles of Melinda Halliwell:Me vs Magic
by piperandleo4eva
Summary: The second installment in the series. Melinda is faced with the difficult decision about using magic. As she stuggles to decide, she learns a little something about her family.


The Chronicles of Melinda Halliwell

Me Against Magic

Crash! "Shit, that was my best vase!" Piper yelled.

"Sorry!" her daughter Melinda yelled from the sunroom. "Freezing practice isn't going so well."

"Well, maybe you could try practicing with objects that don't break so easily." Piper suggested as she walked into the room. She picked up a lacrosse stick. "Something like this, for example."

Melinda grimaced. "With my luck, it would crash into a window."

Piper smiled. "That bad, huh?" Melinda nodded. Piper laughed. "It's okay, your father was worse at blowing things up. When he had my powers, he blew up everything except the thing he was aiming for."

"Yeah, but that's blowing things up. This is freezing things. It's supposed to be easier."

"You haven't used your powers for over a year. It will get easier." Piper gestured at the lacrosse stick. "Try this." She threw it up in the air. Melinda waved her hands at it and it stopped mid-flight. "See? You got it."

Just then the lacrosse stick clattered to the floor. Both Melinda and Piper looked down at it. "Lucky it wasn't a vase, huh?" Melinda asked on her way out of the room.

"Where are you going?"

"Magic school." Piper heard the front door close and sunk onto a wicker chair. Getting through to her daughter was so hard. Magic frustrated her and clothes didn't interest her. Pop culture was lost on both of them except for music, which ended up being the only thing they could discuss peacefully. Everything else ended up in someone stalking out or screaming. Piper sighed, got up, and walked into the kitchen, glancing at the calendar on the refrigerator as she did so. Seeing the date gave her a shock. "June tenth!" Wyatt's nineteenth birthday was the twenty-first and no one had started planning anything. Wyatt hadn't even told her what he wanted. Last year he'd had such a list. He wanted a better car, all sorts of things to impress the girls at college. Last year, he'd been looking forward to his huge birthday party. This year Piper knew that he just wanted to pretend that it didn't exist.

Melinda ran through the hallway, skidding as she reached a classroom door. She pulled open the door and ran in, sliding into a seat in the back.

"Miss Halliwell?" the professor called. She looked up at him. "You're late."

"Sorry sir."

"You aren't wearing robes either, and I see you have no books." With a wave of his hand, a textbook orbed onto her desk. "See me after class in my office." She nodded. "Now class," Leo Wyatt said, "Open your texts to page 400, which is on the demon of fear."

After class, Melinda was accosted by several of her classmates, all exclaiming on not having seen her in over a year and on being the daughter of a Charmed One. This, naturally, made her late for her meeting with the headmaster.

She hurried to his office and slid into the chair in front of his desk. "You could've orbed you know," he told her.

"I know Dad, but I'm working my way up to that." Melinda told him. "It is okay that I call you Dad here, right? I called you sir and Master Wyatt like I was supposed to in class, but…"

Leo smiled. Melinda was so different from her brothers. Wyatt would have called him "Dad" even in class just to flaunt the rules and show off to the other kids-and had done so as a student. Chris would have stuck to the rules and called him "sir", "Master Wyatt", and "Professor", even in private. But Melinda asked. "So you came to class today, I see." he said. "Any particular reason why?"

Melinda smiled. Her father didn't beat around the bush with her like her mother did. Piper never seemed to know what to say to her, so she tiptoed around subjects. Leo always knew just what to say. "My freezes aren't holding." she admitted. "I freeze things and they stay for like a second and then they unfreeze. And don't tell me that my powers are just rusty. I feel like there's something wrong with them. Could it be residue from the disease?"

Leo shook his head. "There's a simple explanation. Your powers are tied to your emotions. You're frustrated and you're not really trying. You want to fail."

Melinda opened her mouth to protest, but Leo held up a hand. "You don't want to be able to freeze. You want to be able to say 'well, I tried, that healing thing must have been a fluke, I can't use magic'. Am I right?"

Melinda smiled and looked at the floor. Right as usual.

Leo continued. "Melinda, your magic is yours. No one can make you use it and no one should try. But it's a gift not a curse. You are meant to help people. It's your destiny. You have control and you can try to change that, but in the long run I think you'll find that you can't run from what you're meant to do, no matter how hard that thing might be. If you embrace it, you can make it a blessing."

Melinda looked up at him. "I can help people without using magic, can't I? Lots of people do. Using magic is like cheating. I can't do that."

"Using magic to help people isn't cheating any more than using a good singing voice to become a star is. They're both gifts meant to be used for specific purposes. Your gift just has to be kept secret."

"My gift deals with life and death. It can get people killed." They both silently thought about those that had passed due to magic. Patty, Andy, Prue, Cole, and of course, Mike, just to name a few.

"Yes, people die because of magic, I won't deny that." Leo said. "But look at all the innocents we've saved. Last week you saved our entire family almost single-handedly. Without you and your magic, Wyatt, Chris, Sam, Paige, and I all would have died. After that, how can you still say that magic kills? It does so much good, the bad is overlooked."

"It shouldn't be. Magic is two-faced. It can help or hurt. Look at Cutrain. He has magic and he kills. He's probably still after us."

Leo sighed, inwardly cursing his stubbornness that Melinda had inherited. "Melinda, I can't make you see things my way, but think about what I've said. Magic will always be a part of you. Learning to love it will ease the frustration, the emptiness."

Back in her room, Melinda flopped down on her bed. Dinner had been a stilted affair, with Piper dancing around the topics of magic, Cutrain, and Wyatt's upcoming birthday. Leo had seemed to have used up his profoundness and stuck to small talk about the restaurant and club. Wyatt was subdued, but no one was surprised; it was getting close to that time. Chris' head was in the clouds, filled with thoughts of Bianca, so Melinda had gotten excused from dinner early. Now she walked over to her closet and pulled out a heavy blue book from underneath the stuff on the floor. She took it over to the bed and sat, propping her back against the wall. She opened the book. The first page was titled The Witch and the Whitelighter. Melinda smiled. As kids, whenever an adult needed to calm them down, or needed them to all be in one place and mellow, they had story time. Paige had told stories of adventure and demons, like the Source and Zankou, that were hard to beat. Phoebe had told the old fairy tales; Henry had given work stories, Coop had told of epic loves, like Lancelot and Guinevere; and Piper had told a mix of fairy tales and real-life demon stories. But Leo always told Melinda's favorite story of the witch and the Whitelighter. It was, in reality, the story of Piper and Leo. However, the story never used names, and it glossed over people like Piper's ex-boyfriend Dan, and the time when Leo had become an Elder and he and Piper were split up. The story always ended with the witch and the Whitelighter living happily ever after with their three kids.

Melinda had found the book at the age of fourteen, right after she had given up magic. She had been cleaning out her closet and had stumbled upon the book, which she had never seen before. She hadn't thought much of it, as her room had been Piper's, then Prue's, then Paige's before it had been hers. She put it aside with all of the other previous owners' things, and had decided to browse through it. It was Leo's story, almost word for word, with pictures. Only the ending was different. The book seemed to keep adding to itself, adding anything significant that happened between Piper and Leo as it happened. Usually Melinda read the whole thing, but tonight she flipped to the last written on page. It had a picture of tonight's dinner. The words read.

_Even though conversation was lacking, both the witch and the Whitelighter knew what the other was thinking. They were both concerned for their children, with their daughter in the foreground. Both had had moments of magical hating, especially when it had kept them apart, but both had always seen the good that it did. Magic had brought them to each other even as it kept them apart, and they knew that their daughter would come around as they had, in her own way, in her own time._

Melinda smiled and closed the book. She got up and started to go downstairs to the living room where her parents were sitting, but stopped. She closed her eyes and thought of the living room and orbed there. Leo and Piper looked up from each other as Melinda orbed in. Piper smiled and hugged her daughter, whispering, "Without magic, I would have never met your father. Even when I was cursing magic, I wouldn't change my life for anything. If I went back, I'd do all over again."

Melinda smiled as Piper let go. "Don't think this means that I'll be using it all the time now." she said. "But occasionally, magic can be a good thing."

Leo laughed as he threw a couch cushion up in the air. Grinning broadly, Melinda waved her hands and froze the cushion. All held their breaths as the cushions stayed frozen, then let them out gratefully. That cushion was going to be there for a long time.

NOTE: Sorry that this installment was not very demon directed, but there was some necessary character development to be done. Next installment: Curtains for Cutrain. After that, My Boyfriend's Back, Wyatt Blues, and The Shadow Knows. Just a little sneak preview.


End file.
